


Healing Waters

by Isis



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Current Events, F/F, POV First Person, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-27
Updated: 2015-09-27
Packaged: 2018-04-23 13:52:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4879312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis/pseuds/Isis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An American <i>genius loci</i> in London.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Healing Waters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [originally](https://archiveofourown.org/users/originally/gifts).



> A treat for originally: I saw your request for "older woman/younger woman mentorship vibes" and was inspired. Not quite what you asked for, maybe, but I hope you like it!
> 
> Thanks to ariadnes_string for the beta read.

When the Gold King mine plug failed and three million gallons of toxic sludge poured down my river, I knew I had to get out of town. Hell, everybody else was: tourists were canceling their hotel stays, rafting companies were shifting gears and offering jeep trips into the Rockies instead. Anyway, August was a slow, sluggish time for me, a low-water lull between the rush of springtime snowmelt and the occasional October flash floods from Pacific hurricanes raining out their last bits of precip over the southwestern states. A good time for a vacation, I figured. And I'd always wanted to see the great rivers of Europe.

There are a lot of things I love about being a small river in the back of beyond, but the hassle I have to go through to fly anywhere is not one of them. When I finally touched down at Heathrow at seven a.m. London time, after three separate flights and almost twenty-four hours, I was parched. Getting stuck in traffic on the M4 was more than I could bear.

"Forget the hotel," I said to the cabbie. He was an Indian; I mean, a guy from India, not Indian like me. "Take me to the nearest river."

He frowned at me in the rearview mirror. "That'd be the Thames, miss."

"Perfect. That's what I'm here for, anyway."

"If you are taking the river cruise you have to go to Westminster. That's where the boats leave from. Would you like me to take you to the dock at Westminster?"

"I don't want a cruise," I said. "Just the river."

He gave me another dubious look, but signaled for a turn, and pulled off at the next exit. The road snaked through a neighborhood of such dense housing that I couldn't believe we were near a mighty river, but we crested a rise and there it was below us. He let me out near the embankment, muttering to himself about the crazy American as he lifted my bag out of the trunk. I waited to jump in until he'd gone.

I knew it wouldn't be like home, but of course, nothing is. Sure, there was all sorts of grunge in the water, but it's not as though I'm not used to it. It's just a different kind of grunge, organohalides and diesel and E. coli instead of iron oxide and arsenic, and yeah, think about _that_ the next time you drink that beer that's supposedly made from pure Rocky Mountain springwater. There's not a river in western Colorado that isn't laced with acid mine residue leached in as the rain seeps through the abandoned mines that honeycomb the mountains. The problem with the Gold King spill is just that there was so _much_ of it.

I dove to the bottom, and the Thames seeped into my needy pores. I tasted oil and industry, felt the tidal power tugging at my body. The water promised excitement and sophistication, murmuring in my ears, caressing my skin. I felt like a silly country girl. I mean, this was the Thames! This was the primo river of England, _the_ waterway of the mighty city of London. Which is a whole lot bigger than my piddly Silverton or Durango, or even Farmington, though Farmington doesn't really count because that's really Tio Juan's territory, and anyway, Durango is nicer even if Farmington's got twice as many people – but London is _five hundred times_ bigger! So as you can imagine, I was pretty overwhelmed.

When I finally surfaced, there were two skinny teenage girls sitting on the embankment next to the clothes I'd stripped off, waiting for me. They looked nearly alike, with flat noses and oval eyes and dark skin, darker than mine. I could feel the water in them, and an echo of the power of the Thames.

"I'm sorry," I said, my words tripping out of my mouth gracelessly as I scrambled up the embankment. "I know I should have waited for an introduction, but it was such a long flight –"

One of the girls shrugged. Her long braids danced on her shoulders like several dozen tiny snakes. "You're all right. Seeing as how you're not from here."

"Go on and get dressed," said the other. "We're to take you to Mum."

* * *

The Lady of the Thames greeted me in her living room. She was a big black woman, and her tributaries around her were mostly black women, too, which was not a sight I was used to. Back home we rivers are mostly Ute like me, Navajo, or Spanish, with a few other tribes and a handful of younger white people, the kind who think of themselves as "American" with no qualifier, but whose grandparents were born a long way away. Maybe even here in London.

She was dressed in gold lace and gold jewelry, and smelled enticingly of saltwater – real saltwater like the ocean, not the alkali salts of my basin. I was thankful that Chelsea and Olympia had given me time to change into my visiting clothes; my Skyhawks t-shirt and sweatpants are comfortable for traveling, but when you pay your respects to a major river, you're expected to clean yourself up. I had braided my damp hair into a single braid down the left side, and wore my best deerskin dress with quills and turquoise, which I'd saved back from the days when that was the kind of thing we wore. Since I only wore it for special occasions, it was in good shape. Maybe it looked a little odd with Fluevogs, but I draw the line at moccasins.

"Come here, girl," said the goddess of the River Thames. Her voice was deep and musical, and had the cadences of some other country underneath the English accent. "Tell me who you are."

I advanced and made the formal sign of respect to one's elders, even though she didn't look much older than me, maybe ten, fifteen years in body. Judging from her appearance and accent, she probably hadn't even been river goddess for as long as I had, either. But she was the Thames. It would have been unthinkable to do otherwise.

"I am the deep heart of the Animas River of Colorado and New Mexico," I said. "Tributary to the San Juan and ultimately to the Colorado River in the western United States."

To my left, Chelsea gave a little gasp and said, " _That_ Annie!" From the corner of my eye I could see her and Olympia's heads bent together, furiously whispering.

Lady Thames ignored them. "Didn't Crane go out there five, six years back?"

She wasn't speaking to me, but to one of her attendants, who said, "I swear, that girl goes all over," with an exasperated fondness that was clear even to me, a stranger from another country.

Crane must have been one of the tributaries; I hadn't met her, but of course visitors usually come to see the old man, not me. "That was a good year, five years ago," I said. We'd had a lot of snow in the mountains that winter, which meant a lot of snowmelt rushing down the mountain creeks and rivers. Springtime that year had been a raucous, joyous celebration across the Colorado River basin. "This year wasn't so good."

"No kidding," said Chelsea. She ignored the dagger-sharp look one of the older women shot her, the clear message that she was talking out of turn. "We recognized your name from Twitter," she told me. "We saw the YouTube video."

"Yeah, and the pictures on the BBC," said Olympia. Her smartphone was in her long fingers, and I didn't need to see more than the flash of color to know what picture was on the screen as she handed it to her mother. You probably saw it, too: the three kayakers floating on a surface of vivid, poisonous orange, the shape of a river but the garish color of safety paint. It was in the New York _Times_ , both print and website. It got millions of hits.

The goddess looked at the picture for a long while. Then, putting down Olympia's smartphone, she looked at me, and her face was nothing but compassion. "Oh, child," she said, and held out her arms.

All my careful politeness crumbled as her tide pulled me in. I wept against her soft bosom as she held me. The strength of her embrace buoyed me, and after a moment I stepped back, knowing I ought to feel embarrassed, feeling nothing but love and affection.

She stood, then, and took my hands. "Come with me, spirit of the Animas River."

"People call me Annie," I said.

"And you should call me Mama, Mama Thames. Come with me now." In her fluid accent it sounded not so much like a child's name for her mother but an acknowledgment of her manner of godhood. She was the center of this place, the source of its power and riches.

She led me down the hall and into a corner room that had a large window looking out to the parking lot and the river beyond. On the adjacent wall, facing what looked like a disused industrial slipway toward the river, a glass door stood open to what would have been a balcony had it not been on the ground floor. Vines with broad leaves and showy flowers twined around the railings, forming a living green privacy screen that smelled of earthy, growing things and tropical perfume. It was like being in Africa, I guessed – I had never been there. It reminded me of Mexico, where I had been, once. Nothing like my desert or the city outside this old warehouse. 

The balcony curved around a pool cupped from the water of the river outside. Steps led down into the water, gleaming faintly with the light slanting from outside the curtain of greenery. Mama Thames dropped my hand, and with one motion her dress fell open around her and slid to the floor. Naked but for her jewelry – gold hoops in her ears, gold chains on her neck and wrists – she still looked every bit a goddess. She was plump, like I was, with rounded breasts and a curved belly; but she was taller than me, and darker, and her fantastically-braided hair formed an elaborate headdress that framed her elegant face. I felt small and dowdy and clumsy beside her.

"Well, come on, Annie," she said to me. "Let's go for a swim."

* * *

I followed her to the bottom, past the remains of rotting wooden piers and concrete pillars. Downstream toward the estuary we slipped, through the fingers of the tide pushing inland. The salt was more pungent here than it had been where the cabbie had dropped me off. My skin tingled as I stretched my arms forward and kicked through the water, following her under the keels of the boat traffic, big noisy bugs above us churning the surface into froth.

Her presence cupped me like two warm hands. I'd jumped into the water a few hours earlier, but that was illicit, a solo flight without a permit. It was different, being in a river along with its spirit, invited and accepted. In my old language the title for the god of a natural place translates to deep heart – by which we mean the source, the wellspring – and that's what it felt like to me: as though the essence of Mama Thames flowed around me with the river. 

I could feel the pulse of the city around us, the factories and the businesses and the people rushing from one place to another. _This is an amazing city,_ I told Mama Thames, _and you are the center of everything._

She smiled at me, pleased, white teeth shining pale and bright. _I am the center of London, maybe. But London is no longer the center of the world, as I had thought when I was a young girl in Nigeria._

We slipped through the current like two dark otters, twisting together and then coming apart. Her skin against mine was warm and sleek, softer than a ripe plum. I unloosed my hair from its braid and let it ripple around us. She tasted like dark beer and imported oysters. I don't know what I tasted like. Iron oxide and arsenic, probably.

She must have sensed my thought, or maybe I'd projected it to her, because she gripped my hand tightly. _Oh, Annie. Oh, my dear child._

I found myself starting to cry again. _My beautiful river. They've ruined it._

I was completely surprised when she slapped me. It didn't hurt – everything is slower and softer under the water – but it shocked me into silence.

_Don't be a fool, girl. It is ruined only if you let them ruin it._

She began eeling through the current again, and as she still had my hand in hers I had to follow.

_When I came to the river,_ Mama Thames told me, _it had been declared dead._ Biologically dead _is what they wrote in their reports and their articles. Well, that would not do, I said. And you see what I have done._ She waved a graceful arm toward a mass of sewage pipes. Empty, unused sewage pipes; there was no flow in and out, no taste of effluent. They were now homes for little fishes that darted in to hide from us, peering out cautiously as we went by. _You have to organize. You have to raise your banner and rally your people. This place used to stink of rotten eggs. Nobody wanted that, not even the men who had made it happen in the first place._

We left the sewage pipes behind. Gradually the river's concrete banks became earth again; reeds grew from the sediment and tiny shellfish clung to the rubble. I could feel the sea waiting beyond, breathing its salty tide in and out of the estuary. And past that the ocean, where all rivers eventually drown themselves. 

Here, at the edge of the city, we paused. Below us the remains of a barge tilted out of the bottom. _The water goes in, and the water goes out,_ Mama Thames told me. _There is a saying, that you cannot step in the same river twice. But the truth is that you cannot step in the same river even once._

_I don't have tides._ I knew I sounded like a stubborn child. I didn't care.

_No. You have mountains piled high with snow that melts every summer. You have fresh water that springs right out of the rock._ Her hand caressed my cheek, her fingers stroking through my hair. I closed my eyes. _Enough water can wash away anything._

* * *

The tall woman at the United counter frowned as she processed my ticket, lines creasing her make-up. "You're sure you want to change this? You're on a flight to Paris tomorrow, and then Belgrade." Her long pink-enameled fingernails hovered over her terminal keys like indecisive birds.

"Yeah, I've got to get back home. Family emergency."

Her face changed at once. "Oh, I'm so sorry, Ms. River. We can get you on a plane to Newark – at this hour there's nothing direct to Denver, I'm afraid – and you can either go standby for the direct flight, or change in Chicago. Which shall I book?"

"Whichever," I said. I was looking past her at the television monitor in the main terminal seating area. The sound was off, but the closed-caption text scrolled by at the bottom: ANGRY COLORADO RESIDENTS DEMAND E.P.A. MEETING. Good, I thought. I'd be there when it happened, and I'd be the angriest of all. I looked back to her concerned face. "Whatever gets me home the quickest."

She typed something into the terminal. "I see you only got here yesterday morning. I do hope you have the chance to return to London in the future."

"I plan to," I told her. "I've got a friend here I promised to visit again." Maybe this winter, I'd said. When the water was low and white frost feathers formed around the edges of the riverbanks and the multitude of exposed rocks. Nothing much to do at home in the winter unless you like skiing, which I don't. I like my water liquid.

"Very good," the United agent said approvingly. The machine next to her spit out a new ticket, and she handed it to me.

I left the counter and headed past the monitor, which now showed a picture of a man in a suit. The scrolling text said something about the Australian House of Representatives. I ignored it and headed for the security checkpoint, and my departure gate, and home.

**Author's Note:**

> [This is the photo on Olympia's smartphone.](http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/150810103359-01-colorado-river-spill-restricted-super-169.jpg)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Healing Waters](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13133082) by [sisi_rambles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sisi_rambles/pseuds/sisi_rambles)




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